Category: Politics

A prominent Newark clergyman raised the spectre of disorder in the city’s streets unless Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo acts quickly to restore the academic independence of Essex County College , plug a budget shortfall at the school, and help the two-year college remain open and fully accredited.(more…)

Essex County College, an institution that has overcome daunting problems in the past, now faces the worst crisis in its 50-year history—the possible loss of its accreditation and, with it, its ability to operate as a public, degree-granting institution.(more…)

Thousands of cases. Maybe tens of thousands. One for every child in New Jersey who attended class Monday and Tuesday in near 100 degree heat without air conditioning. Who will still be in school next week when the heat returns–and in September.(more…)

Donald Trump cannot wreck democracy, as my parents used to say, “all by his lonesome.” He needs help and he’s getting it from the Republicans whose legacy once included destroying the careers of those who said nice things about Russians–the same Russians who are now Donald Trump’s pillow-talking bedmates. Trump needs help and he is certainly getting it from some surprising places–like from a nerdy little guy named Rodney Frelinghuysen, the forever Republican congressman from New Jersey’s 11th Congressional district.(more…)

Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni, former top aides to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and the only two persons to face trial in the 2013 Bridgegate scandal, were sentenced today. Baroni got two years; Kelly, 18 months. They could have received more time in jail. Christie, of course, was never charged and, despite repeated testimony at trial that he knew in advance of the plot to close Fort Lee ramps to the George Washington Bridge, he faced no sanction whatsoever.(more…)

Newark’s St. Benedict’s Preparatory School, for nearly 150 years an all-boys’ secondary school, is about to become what its headmaster calls a “pioneering” hybrid, expanding to include both elementary schooling and co-education–with girls admitted to its middle school division for the first time in its history.

Paul Robeson as a member of the RU football team–a two-time All-American.

The Rutgers University football stadium is named after a company in Sparta, High Point Solutions, whose owner, Thomas Mendiburu, is an active supporter of President Donald Trump and served on Trump’s finance transition committee. Trump, famously, is a great admirer of Russia and of its president, Vladimir Putin, someone who may have interfered with the 2016 American election.(more…)

Lawyers for Newark’s public school children have asked New Jersey’s appellate courts to block the Christie Administration’s effort to nearly double charter school enrollment in the state’s largest school district, warning the increased privatization of the city’s schools would deepen the system’s fiscal crisis, increase racial isolation, and deprive the neediest public school students of essential services.(more…)

Editor’s Note: In the spring of 2016, James Fallows, the senior editor of The Atlantic Monthly magazine, began what he called a series of “time capsules” that could, in the future, provide a key as to what Americans were thinking during the election campaign–as Trump began his march to the presidency. He finished with 152 of the “time capsules” just before the vote. This site will publish one of the capsules every week or so and that should bring us to the doorstep of the 2020 election. (more…)